Jonathan Kay : Caste of characters

"But it is not so much Homer's choice of words as his manner of speaking them that is instructive. Though Homer is dumb in any language, France's
dub community decided the star of the show shouldn't speak in anything less than standard French. "There is a levelling effect," says Ãric Plourde, a
French-Canadian linguist who wrote his master's thesis on the translation of The Simpsons. "The French brought the pronunciation of almost all the
characters to more or less the same plane." The uniform quality of the language, he argues, "reflects a belief in the uniqueness and irreducible
character of the French identity" - in other words, the French are secure enough to insist that even a dolt can, and should, speak proper French. This
approach, Plourde says, betrays an "imperialist" attitude towards language animated by the nation's colony-holding past."